


A Quiet End

by Mertiya



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Ambiguously-gendered MC, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I mean how would you feel if you woke up and everyone kept telling you that you were a hunter, Other, POV First Person, The hunter really doesn't want to hunt, and you had no memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 13:32:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13637253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: A reluctant hunter navigates Central Yharnam.





	A Quiet End

**Author's Note:**

> In between getting my ass kicked by the Blood-starved Beast, I bring you this tidbit. Depending where the game ends up going, this may be all or I may expand on it later.

            Everything is blood and viscera. I wish I remembered my life before waking on a table with a bandage about my arm, but there is nothing but an empty void. Stumbling down from the table, I blundered into a wounded creature whose viciously raking claws opened my belly, and I lay on the floor, stunned, until another wild swing mercifully spared me the slow death I would otherwise have experienced.

            I died and woke in white mist, to sighing souls and a strange, blossoming, pale world. It was empty and quiet there, but the souls whispered to me that I was a hunter, clothed me, gave me a weapon, and sent me back, to where the beast still waited. I died again, my leg collapsing as I tried to dodge to the side. The creature slammed me into the table with such force that I was in the white place again before I knew it.

            On my third wakening, I ran it through with the point of my sword and stood, panting, over its corpse. I spoke with a woman through a rotted door; her voice was soft and sweet, but she offered me no succor. She, too, addressed me as “Hunter,” although she gave herself a name—Iosefka.

            Opening the door to the building of my awakening for the first time, I found myself in a gloomy, blood-spattered city beneath an orange-tinged sky. My already non-too-high spirits sank even lower.

            Over the course of the next hours, I explored this place cautiously. Yharnam, I found out it was called, from the shout of a man who shortly thereafter cut my head off with an axe. At least, I think he did. Certainly, I remember an axe coming at the side of my neck and then mist again. This became something of a pattern.

            I cannot tell you how many hours—how many days—how many _weeks_ I spent walking the same streets, dying, waking, dying again. Eventually, I began to learn how to use the weapon that had been placed in my hand. I did not want to use it, but it seemed the only way to avoid pain, the only thing I could do that might let me escape. It was quiet in the place with the mist, but it was lonely. So lonely that, when I found a woman-shaped doll seated near the path, I spent a long time curled against her side, pretending she could speak, pretending there was at least one human being in all the world who would offer me a single scrap of comfort.

            Nervous energy drove me out again. Although I am sure that the time I spent was hours, if not days, the sky above me barely changed. It seemed to reset every time I died, which was about once every few hours. I spoke with a kind man behind a lighted window, who suggested I search for the chapel. He called me Hunter as well, and when I tried to question him, he merely said, “Are you not?” and dissolved into a fit of coughing. I could not find it in my heart to press him more.

            The creatures I encountered seemed to grow steadily more horrific. At first, what appeared to be men—albeit in ragged clothing and with greying faces—had attacked me, screaming abuse. I grew used to killing them quickly, and what had at first been fearful became almost routine. At least they spoke with me, even if it was to call me “beast” and “outsider.” I knocked on a few more doors, but was turned away from all of them.

            On one sojourn, I found someone who needed something. A little girl pushed her curtain aside and blinked at me. “Are you a Hunter?” she asked, and she sounded so hopeful that I could only nod. Perhaps I had become one, like a piece of dough pushed through a cookie-cutter. “Daddy didn’t come home,” she told me, “and Mummy went out after him, but she forgot to take the music box with her. She needs it, because it makes Daddy remember who he is. Please, could you find her and give it to her?” I could hardly refuse such a heartfelt request. She pushed open the window a little nervously and handed me the delicate little box. “Oh, she’s wearing a red jeweled brooch, so you’ll know it’s her.”

            I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I told her, and she actually smiled.

            “Thank you,” she whispered, before closing the window. The smile warmed me for hours afterwards, and her faith in me pushed me on to explore new areas I had avoided until then out of exhaustion and fear of more pain.

            I died again, then—countless times. I was torn apart by two more beasts who took exception to my setting foot on what they clearly regarded as their bridge. I was impaled by an elongated man in the sewers, chewed on by rats—I still did not find any sign of a woman with a red jeweled brooch. I found my way past the beasts on the bridge only to be attacked by an enormous, shrieking creature that I barely had time to glimpse before I was crushed by a single blow.

            This time, I woke shuddering in a cold sweat before the tombs in the misty place, and a gentle voice spoke from behind me, “Welcome home, good Hunter.”

            I turned in confusion to see that the doll was getting to her feet. “Oh, god,” I said. “How?”

            She halted, tilting her head on one side. “I do not understand,” she told me.

            I stumbled across the rocky ground towards her. “Please,” I said, hoarsely. “Please—” but I did not know how to finish. I reached out to take her hand but paused, afraid she would object. She stood still for a moment, then mirrored my gesture, and for a fleeting moment, our palms pressed together. It was the first kind touch I remembered ever feeling, and I staggered forward and would have fallen, if she had not caught me.

            “Oh—what is wrong?” she asked.

            “I’ve just been—very alone,” I told her wearily, feeling the rough wool of her brown capelet beneath my hands. “Very tired—I do not know when I last slept—”

            “Then sleep now, good Hunter,” she murmured softly. She took a step backwards and spread her skirts as she took a seat, then patted her knees. “I do not mind.”

            I believe I simply stared at her for a moment. Then, “you’re sure?”

            She nodded and smiled faintly. “I want to help you.”

            With a soft intake of breath, I knelt in front of her and laid my head in her lap. I intended to simply lie against her and shut my eyes, but I was weeping before I realized it. “Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed, and I felt her hands running carefully through my hair. “It is all right.”

            I clutched at her skirts and tried to stop the tears, but they would not be denied. I do not know how long I cried, but she held me and stroked me until the tears finally ebbed, until I sank into a stuporous sleep against her knees and woke, for once, to mist that for once did not seem as foreboding. If she called me Hunter, well—perhaps I could be one, for her sake. For the sake of the child still waiting at home for her mother. I lifted my cane with a renewed sense of purpose.

            I began to search the dark corners of Yharnam for bits and baubles. I found some bright coins—useless for their intended purpose, but still able to catch the light—and I used the thin, sharp claw of one of the smaller beasts to pierce them. I threaded them on a bit of string and gave them to the doll. “What is it for?” she asked me.

            “It’s a necklace,” I told her, a little embarrassed.

            “No one ever made me a necklace before,” she said, a little cautiously, but she took it from my hands and put it over her head. “It shines,” she continued, quietly, tilting a coin first one way and then the other. “Thank you.” I wanted to embrace her, but I didn’t know how to say that, so I only smiled back.

            I continued to search for the girl’s mother. The little white creatures—the messengers—in the Hunter’s Dream gave me a bell to ring if I needed help, but I did not use it immediately, for fear of dragging someone else into an impossible situation. After some time, though, set upon by torch-wielding men again, with three dogs nipping at my heels, exhausted and desperate to save myself from the pain of another death, I rang it. The sound of the bell resonated hollowly through my skull. I shivered as a haze seemed to pass before my eyes.

            “Take care, then!” someone shouted, and I saw that it was a tall man            in a flat, wide-brimmed hat, wielding an enormous axe. I could smell blood on him and something mustier I could not identify. He sliced the side of one dog, then another, and I was able to send the remaining opponents staggering backward with a desperate flick of my whip.

            “Thank you,” I gasped.

            “Think nothing of it,” he grunted. “Take more care in the future, Hunter.”

            “Wait,” I said, as he turned to leave. “What is your name?”

            “They call me Father Gascoigne.”

            I stood and watched him walk away; five minutes later, a dagger was thrust between my ribs.

            Soul-weary and without even a bauble to improve matters, I limped up the path in the Hunter’s Dream, thinking only of seeing the doll. She was back in her customary seat at the lip of the stones, but she did not stir as I approached. At first, I thought she was sleeping and then, with dawning horror, I realized that she was not. She lay tumbled in a little inanimate heap, the way she had lain when I first entered the Dream. I touched her face and felt only cold plastic, stared into her eyes, and they were glass. Whatever bright magic had animated her was gone, and I could do nothing but stare blankly as the last of my hope vanished.

            I sat beside her then, took her unresponsive hand in mine and whispered to her all that I wished I had forced myself to say before. How much her soft voice had meant to me, how much I had grown accustomed to the light brush of her hand, and how the only thing to give me happiness in this strange, dark place to which I had been woken or born was to be beside her. I kissed her on the cheek, and then I trudged down the path once again.

            I took a new route this time and found myself in an old churchyard. There was a man standing before one of the graves, a man in a wide-brimmed hat and long jacket whom I recognized. I opened my mouth to greet him, but before I could, he spoke in a hollow, strange voice. “Beasts all over the shop…you’ll be one of them, too, sooner or later…” Then he raised his axe and turned towards me with eyes that glittered with some dark urge.

            I ran from him, stumbling a little over the uneven stones of the graveyard, trying to keep some distance between the two of us. The report of a gun was very loud, and I felt the buckshot enter my upper arm, as painful as ever. I clambered up to a stone ledge, in the hopes that I would be able to escape him that way, and came face to face with a woman’s corpse lying with arms wide open, glassy eyes pointed at the sky. On her breast was a jeweled red brooch.

            “No,” I whispered, plucking it up with shaking fingers, and I pulled the tiny music box from the pocket of my greatcoat. It was the work of just a moment to wind it, and I stared down at the figure of Father Gascoigne, as he shuddered, his eyes clearing momentarily of the darkness that had lingered in them. “Oh, no.”

            I ran from him, then, tossing aside a blood cocktail to draw his attention as I pelted through the darkness, and I was weeping as I ran, and cursing as well. The world, which at first had seemed so dark—it had opened for a moment to show a glimpse or two of happiness, which had shattered when I tried to reach for more than a moments’ worth.

            I found the girl’s lighted window easily enough.

            “Did you find her?” she asked, and I did not know what to do. Finally, I did the only thing I could think of and laid the brooch upon the sill. There was a sharp intake of breath, and then a moaning sob. “Mummy—Mummy—oh no—oh, don’t leave me alone! Oh, please.”

            She cried and cried. I did not ask her to let me in; I did not know if she would, and I did not want to trouble her any more than I already had. I failed her, just as surely as I failed the doll. Finally, I slumped down with my back against her little window. I am no hunter.

            So, then. Here I sit. Here I sit and here I stay, while the long night passes overhead and grows ever darker. The child needs a protector, and I have no one and nothing else. I never wanted to be a hunter, and the only memories of happy times I have are of the glint of coins around the neck of a life-like doll. I will cling to those memories, and I will protect the child, and that will be my last hunt.

           

           

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still mad you can't just hang up your rifle and take care of the kid.


End file.
